My files have become hidden - how do I get at them?

I was trying to free up some space on my hard drive as I was showing only 3.5 out of 40GB available. I read a thread in this forum that suggested downloading whatsize to see what could be done away with. Whatsize showed a second user with my name but a . in front that was using up 17GB's. I logged off my computer - which I never do - to see if when I logged back on this other user would show up. Instead my screen had reverted to the way it looked when I first bought my ibook (new). The user name is mine and it responds to my password but I cannot find my photos, docs or music files. The hard drive is still showing as nearly full so I assume that the files are in here somewhere. I tried logging on as the root user - but I still could not find my files. Now I have purchased an external hard drive (250 GB's) - can I dump the entire contents of my drive onto the external drive and try to find the files that way? Please help me. I do not know where to look and I do not want to cause any further damage. Thanks for your time!
ibook G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Tamara:
In your first post in another thread, you said:
So I looked in the help menu to try to delete the user. It said to turn off filevault. I tried and was told I did not have enough diskspace.
Have you been able to do anything about turning FileWault off? I suspect that you were not able to, since FileVault saves your User Folder in a sparseimage which occupies as much space as your Users Folder. In order to be able to turn FileVault off, you need that much space more. This article gives you a bit more information about the issue.
Buying an external HDD is a good move. Actually that would have been my first recommendation. I hope that you bought a firewire external HDD, as you cannot make a bootable clone on a USB device. So, go ahead and clone your entire internal HDD to the external Firewire HDD using SuperDuper. SD will make a bootable clone from which you will later boot your computer.
(The . in front of your user name indicates it is a hidden file. It might be that your Home Folder was renamed, with a . in front of it. You can try downloading Wizzard and see if it shows your hidden folder. Note: This is a parenthesis; I suggest backing up and disabling FileVault first).
Post back and let me know how it is going, and we will see what comes next.
Good luck.
cornelius

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